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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24689842">that which cures the tempest</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rory_the_dragon/pseuds/rory_the_dragon'>rory_the_dragon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Peaky Blinders (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon-Typical Gang Behavior, Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 08:16:23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,127</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24689842</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rory_the_dragon/pseuds/rory_the_dragon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Luca makes Tommy Shelby a deal.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Luca Changretta/Tommy Shelby</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>62</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>that which cures the tempest</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/salazarsslytherin/gifts">salazarsslytherin</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p>Luca Changretta understands patience.</p>
<p>He wears it like a second skin these days, ever since being inside and the long, drawn-out hours sliding back and forth between waiting and nothing. In prison, it became an artform, learning how to pass hours with the slow blink of an eye, with the long turn of a page of his only book, and the news of his father’s death coming with half a year left to serve only taught him the necessity of the virtue.</p>
<p>Everything Luca does, he does precisely, slowly, and with careful forethought. </p>
<p>Revenge, even more so.</p>
<p>On his first day breathing fresh air again, he takes his mother out to the cafe on 49th Street. He orders two espressos, and watches New York come to life around them. So much noise, the smell of shit and piss and smoke and his mother’s perfume, cars rushing past the sidewalk, Luca lets it wash over him as he sips at good, strong coffee and considers a world without his father in it. Without Angel.</p>
<p>After the coffee, he pockets the matchbook from the table, breaking off one to roll between his teeth. “Tell me everything you know,” He says, slow and deliberate. “About Thomas Shelby.”</p>
<p>He understands how to turn patience into a weapon, built just for his hand with the point aimed at Shelby.</p>
<p>Luca listens as his mother, now a colder woman than he remembers leaving at the Liverpool docks those years ago but still his mama, takes him through the three boys she’d had in her class who grew up to run a razor gang in Birmingham, the aunt who keeps them in line, the sister with the penchant for communism, the cousin being groomed as successor. There are others, plenty of others, a long list of people Audrey Changretta knows to be loyal to a fault, to a death, to the Shelbys - to the <em> Peaky Blinders </em> - but here Luca finds the first weakness.</p>
<p>(Actually, here he finds the second. The first he found when his mother made it to New York in the first place. Sentiment.)</p>
<p>This weakness is arrogance and Luca will be sure to bring it to heel. </p>
<p> - </p>
<p>He remembers Tommy Shelby. Not well, of course. Tommy was younger than him and while Luca’s mother was the local teacher, Luca was first son of the Changretta family and he had had more important things to consider than the kids in his mother’s classes. He spent more time in London with his father than he did in Birmingham, but he remembers a quick and clever boy, small for his age as evidence of a home without a constant assurance of food on the table, and boys like that, clever boys who grow up hungry, grow up to be dangerous.</p>
<p>More importantly, he remembers a night when he was twenty-one. In a year, he’d be on a ship back to New York, escaping an murder charge that would teach him his first lesson in carelessness, but for now he was young, his name was gold in the streets of Birmingham, and he’d been on his way home after a... <em> confrontation </em> with a man who owed his father money, wiping the blood from his knuckles with his handkerchief when he caught sight of the second-eldest Shelby boy in the mouth of an alley.</p>
<p>Only one reason for a boy to be in an alley near Hurst Street - just outside of Small Heath, which Luca now knows to be Tommy Shelby’s little kingdom and now understands the significance of a Tommy who couldn’t have been more than seventeen outside of where people might recognise him - and Luca wouldn’t have even paused to notice the kid twice except for the way Tommy slipped out of the shadows with a low, “Changretta.” </p>
<p>He’d felt the assessing gaze as Tommy eyed up the suit he wore, the monogrammed handkerchief, the shine of his shoes, all adding up to a rich mark. But Tommy had known who he was, what his <em>name </em> was, and still approached. Still dared. And Luca, blood still running high from the beating, turned.</p>
<p>“You be careful saying that name around here, kid. There’s folks meaner than me on these streets.” </p>
<p>In the light of the street-lamp, Tommy Shelby had a hunted quality to the hollow of his cheeks, the steady watchfulness of his eyes, that ignited something in Luca’s chest. Starving, Luca’s mind supplied. Mother threw herself in the canal not six months past. No wonder he was here, approaching passing men at night. </p>
<p>“I doubt that.” For all his near-scrawniness - height and hunger hindering him somewhat - Tommy Shelby hadn’t seemed scared of him. Stupid, maybe, but Luca was spoiling for something more than a fight. Maybe the kid had a good read on that kind of thing. Depended on how long he’d been on the streets for. “You’ve been round John Mellor’s tonight, right? He didn’t pay on time so you torched the pub.”</p>
<p>Luca had raised an eyebrow, amused more than anything at the audacity of the kid, and walked closer. “And his house,” he corrected, wanting to see what the boy’s face did at that. He was disappointed when Tommy only took out a cigarette, crumpled from his pocket, and held it out for a light.</p>
<p>“I’ve seen what fire does to men.” Tommy held out the cigarette after his first deep inhale, warming him from the cold of the street, and Luca took it. The tip was warm and damp. “It gets in their blood, you see. Makes ‘em wild. Like an horse with a scare in it.”</p>
<p>“You saying I’m a horse, kid?”</p>
<p>“I’m saying I know what to do with wild men.”</p>
<p>“Oh yeah?” Luca breathed in the smoke of the cigarette, holding it deep in his lungs where it could catch alight or smother out altogether. Shelby’s tongue, pink and pointed, darted out across his lips. Too quick at any other time to mean anything, but with the half-light picking up the barest movement, the slightest shine on his lips, it was the spark.</p>
<p>Luca had tossed the cigarette to one side, enjoying the pinched quality Tommy’s lips had taken on at watching the waste of his heat source for the night before he’d pushed away the emotion like it’d never been there. “How’s about you show me, huh?”</p>
<p>Afterwards, Luca had given Tommy his handkerchief for his mouth, a cigarette from his silver case to replace the one he’d thrown, and a folded pound. Tommy had gotten up, tucked the pound in his pocket, and walked away without another word.</p>
<p>The next week, Luca’s mother had made some comment about how nice it was that John Shelby finally had shoes at school now and that had been the last that Luca thought of the Shelbys for a long, long time.</p>
<p>The memory provides Luca with two vital pieces of information but the key one is that there is nothing that Thomas Shelby won’t do for his family. </p>
<p> - </p>
<p>The ship from New York to London takes a week. It’s a steady passage, but they keep a good pace. Luca keeps an eye on his pocket-watch every hour as soon as the New York docks slip out of sight. He slips it away after the third day on the ocean and doesn't check it again until he sees England rise up out of the ocean. </p>
<p>On that third day at sea, Audrey Changretta posted four black hands to four different uk addresses. A sixth will be delivered to the Shelby Company building in Boston addressed to Ada Thorne, but she won’t be there to receive it. The fifth rests in Luca’s breast pocket, ready for a personal delivery.</p>
<p>They arrive before the letters, as planned, and Luca heads first to his hotel in Stratford. The car circles past Birmingham on the drive, and Luca recognises the smog and the stink as a home that was never really his. Birmingham was a stopping place, between Sicily and New York, never big enough for Luca. If he were a big fish in a small pond then, now he’s a shark, and booking a suite at the Midland would cause ripples he doesn’t want to disturb the peace. At least, not yet.</p>
<p>So, Stratford it is, nearby and quiet, away from the Birmingham smoke and rabble. He and his men take the third floor of the hotel with the right amount of money in the clerk’s hands, and alone again Luca takes the time to wash the ship off of him. Bathing is a luxury since prison, and he rests in the claw-footed bath as the sun sets, rolling a fresh match along his tongue.</p>
<p>Stratford is not Birmingham, but it is England and Luca hates knowing that this is the country where his father died. Vincente Changretta has faded in his later years, no longer the bull of a man who held Birmingham in an iron fist without even trying, paying tribute to a jumped-up razor gang at the end and dying by their gun, but he deserved to die on Italian soil. </p>
<p>The nature of this vendetta is a curious one. By rights, it should be fulfilled. For the killing of Grace Shelby, the Blinders took Vincente. They took Angel too but Luca’s brother, may he rest in peace, was a restauranteur not a gangster and a fool to step out with a Peaky woman besides, no matter their father’s offence to the restriction. Were it not for Luca’s mother and the hatred festering inside her heart, Luca would call the vendetta done. But she had asked, and for the humiliation of the killing without dignity or respect to the Changretta name, Luca will see the dirty work done.</p>
<p>But there’s more than one way for a man to submit.</p>
<p>When the water begins to cool, Luca rises to dress in his darkest suit, oils his hair, and kneels to speak the sorrowful mysteries over the rosary inked into his wrist. At the last, he makes the sign of the cross, asks god to avert his eyes, and heads out with only Matteo to cover his back. His plan for Thomas Shelby comes in three parts and the first begins tonight.</p>
<p> - </p>
<p>First, he and Matteo drive to the ridiculous country house that Shelby thinks will hide the dirt he grew out of, and Matteo stays parked in the car with the engine running as Luca begins the long walk up the drive. He doesn’t expect to need a getaway driver, but it keeps Matteo calm and Luca moves alone up the driveway towards the lit windows of Tommy’s home, a predator in the dark.</p>
<p>He can see the silhouette of a man in the upstairs window. From the man Luca had planted in the house months ago, he knows the room belongs to Charles Shelby, the son, and that Tommy himself sees the child to bed every night. The routine allows Luca to approach the house with ease, and hand the letter addressed to Thomas Shelby to the housekeeper who answers the door without Tommy ever knowing he was here.</p>
<p>He will, though, when he sees the lack of stamp on the envelope. He will know how close Luca got.</p>
<p>And Luca waits. He shouldn’t, really. The knowing should be enough, but he wants to see what Tommy does when the letter is handed to him and he realises. Luca can be patient, but he has never denied himself the pleasure of something he wants.</p>
<p>So he waits in the shadows of the gate and watches the big open window of Shelby’s office as Tommy re-enters the room, sits back in his chair and tips his head back in something Luca can only assume is a sigh. Luca can’t tell much from a silhouette through a net curtain, but Thomas Shelby looks a tired man.</p>
<p>He sees the exact moment Shelby sees the black ink imprint of a hand - Luca’s hand - signed with the Changretta name. Shelby moves like a dog shown the whip, immediately springing into action, and Luca watches him dial and dial and dial around his family, only one of whom seems to answer him - Arthur Shelby, Luca is sure. Despite the estrangement of the past year, Arthur Shelby is devoted to his brother like a dog to a master.</p>
<p>Then he watches Tommy Shelby pick up the envelope once again and stiffen.</p>
<p>Luca smiles, slow, turns his back on the sudden swift shadow of Shelby pulling a revolver from his cabinet and is gone back down the drive before the front door swings open and Shelby comes bellowing out into the night. </p>
<p> - </p>
<p>The next part, Luca does not oversee himself but early next morning his men go quietly to the house of John Shelby and put a bullet in his leg, his shoulder, and his hip. Matteo informs him that Michael Gray was also there, and for good measure they put two bullets into him as well. </p>
<p>Even the shitty fucking English coffee tastes sweeter after that. Luca savours the victory and allows Tommy the day to regroup. With his brother and his cousin already in the hospital, the reality of the situation must be setting in and Luca wants Tommy to stew in it, to try and plan futile ways to manoeuvre his family into safety, away from whatever invisible net Luca is tightening around them. </p>
<p>There is no net. Just the threat of one is enough for Luca’s next move.</p>
<p> - </p>
<p>Which is to walk into Tommy Shelby’s office, with a false name and a good, Italian made, <em> Changretta </em> made, suit and wait as the man Shelby grew into works out just who is sitting opposite him.</p>
<p>As he gets there, Luca drags his eyes over him, taking him in for the first time properly. Thomas Shelby has grown since he was seventeen, but not by much. There’s more width to his shoulders, a coiled tension in his smaller frame, but he is still slim hipped and hungry-eyed. And his mouth is the same. Like ripe fruit.</p>
<p>“<em>Good</em>.” Luca smiles as Tommy finally addresses him by name - the illusion of Monsieur Paz wasn’t meant to last long anyway; the point of this meeting is so Tommy knows exactly who he’s dealing with once again - and the expression spreads as lazily as the word draws out between them. “I see you got my letter.”</p>
<p>“I got your message.” Shoulders back, eyes ahead. Tommy Shelby was a Sergeant Major and as much as the war bores Luca he won’t forget that fact. “Yes.”</p>
<p>“How is your brother? And your cousin…” He casts about as if searching for the name, having never met the once-lost son of Polly Gray, but Luca knows the boy’s name, his height, his past and his crimes. He knows the pubs he drinks at and where he gets the drugs he sniffs up his nose. He has spent the past year learning everything there is to know about the Shelby family, and in the pause for a name Luca now knows like his own brother’s, Tommy knows it. “Michael?”</p>
<p>The emptied-out gun spins across the table as Tommy discards it. “Better than Antonio.”</p>
<p>The grin on Luca’s face freezes, just for a second. He hadn’t expected Shelby to discover Antonio for a while longer, not until Luca wanted him found, but undercover had never been the job for Antonio. He’d just been the only one of them willing to peel potatoes for six months. Luca makes a note to send a letter and money to the man’s family, then he puts it away, uses it. “Sloppy work. He’d been there since October.”</p>
<p>“And you were there last night.” </p>
<p>The memory of watching Tommy unseen is a pool of warmth in Luca’s chest. He could have watched all night, never having been caught, were it not for the fact that he wanted to be. He wonders what he would have seen, if Tommy is the type to take serving girls over his desk or fuck stable-hands in the hay. He doubts it. “You see? How close I get.”</p>
<p>“What do you <em> want </em> ?” Tommy’s near-snarl cuts the end of Luca’s words and he lifts an eyebrow at the interruption but lets it slide because <em> this </em> is why he came here, to this office all the way from New York, to make Tommy an offer he can only accept on his knees.</p>
<p>He takes his time, opens the side of his jacket again to pull out the matchbook, snaps off a fresh stick and slots it between his lips. “I want you to know that I could’ve had a bullet put in your brother’s head yesterday. Your cousin’s too. I could’ve killed your housekeeper, Frances, I think her name is, right? Then walked into your halls to take you too. I know where your brother Arthur lives, and we’ve had eyes on Ada Thorne since she set foot in a Boston office last year. And your aunt, well, I hear she sleeps with the front door open these days.” Luca tested the handle himself, in fact, and from the look on Tommy’s face he knows it too. “I want you to know all this and realise that you have three options.”</p>
<p>He looks up from under his brow to where Tommy is standing rigid and waiting. Luca wonders if Tommy remembers that night in an alley near Hurst Street, if he can tell what’s coming.</p>
<p>“The first option, my mother’s favourite option I might add, is that we take you all. One by one. Now, me? I think it’s a little excessive, but I do love my mother very dearly and what makes her happy....” He shrugs and slowly unfolds himself from the leather seat to stand by the window, overlooking the factory below. “The second is much more lucrative. To prevent the previously mentioned excess, you take a pen and you sign every last piece of Shelby Holdings over to me and we call it done. No muss, no fuss.” He pauses here, because he wants-</p>
<p>“And the third?”</p>
<p>-Tommy to ask him for it. </p>
<p>Without turning, Luca reaches up and closes the blinds on the window. Behind him, he hears a sharp intake of breath Tommy wasn’t quick enough to hide. In the reflection of the window, he can see the tense lines of Tommy’s mouth, his shoulders, and knows that he remembers the alley. “The third option is that, tonight, you come to my hotel room, you come alone, and we settle this between us.”</p>
<p>He snaps another blind shut. “You can take the first option, or the second. You can even fight back, and we’ll do this honourably. No children, no civilians. You might even win. But…” He weighs up adding <em> but are you willing to risk it</em>, and instead chooses a truth. “I’m not a cruel man. I don’t take my pleasures in violence. You’ll probably even enjoy yourself.” Another blind, the one closest to Tommy. “My lovers usually do.”</p>
<p>The word ‘lover’ hits Tommy like a bullet. Luca watches it pass through him and nods. “Okay, then.” and makes to leave.</p>
<p>“Wait.”</p>
<p>Luca stops.</p>
<p>“Like Hurst Street?” Tommy phrases it as a question, though it’s anything but.</p>
<p>He turns back. </p>
<p>He turns back and Tommy is already there.</p>
<p>He’s efficient, businesslike, as he sheds Luca’s coat and then his jacket and waistcoat from his shoulders. There’s a convenient coat-stand, with Tommy’s other impotent gun hanging from the holster, and Luca’s jackets are hung there before Tommy’s hands come back to him, to the snap of his trousers and the buckles of his braces which are undone with military precision.</p>
<p>Luca lets him, plants his feet apart as Tommy slips the buttons out until there’s enough room for his hand, warm and - does Luca imagine the shaking?, to slip into the gap. Luca inhales at the contact as Tommy cups him through his underwear and gets a lungful of Tommy’s cologne. It’s expensive stuff, sharp and bright and perfect for the man in front of him, inching closer without realising as his hand coaxes Luca’s very willing cock to attention.</p>
<p>His hands find the juts of Tommy’s hips and he walks them back to the nearest flat surface - the office door with its frosted panel - and he doesn’t let go.</p>
<p>This close, Luca can count the man’s eyelashes, the faint freckles on his cheeks, and the information automatically files itself away in the folder marked Shelby along with the way Tommy’s teeth catch on his bottom lip in concentration, even in spite of himself.</p>
<p>“How long has it been?” He asks, because he’s curious, he wants to know, and Tommy answers by moving his hand to hold Luca without the cloth barrier, skin to skin. Luca feels himself jerk a little at the sudden move, the head of his cock growing wet. Tommy wipes his thumb against the dampness, and uses it as slick. “Since you’ve done this for a man, huh? Since Hurst Street?”</p>
<p>Luca knows he wasn’t the only man who paid Tommy for his time back then. The Shelby’s needed to eat and Tommy was the only one making money back then, but he wonders whether Tommy got a taste for it. </p>
<p>At this, Tommy’s eyes rise from where they’d been fixated on the task at hand, at the quick movements of his hand disappearing into the material of Luca’s trousers, and he meets Luca’s gaze without blinking. Luca’s cock twitches at the blue, stormy and piercing, staring into him without words, and he sees Tommy feel it in his hand. Watches as Tommy makes himself let go of his lower lip, which comes away redder than before.</p>
<p>“No?” Disappointing. “If you don’t feel like talking, you can put your mouth to better use. Then it’ll be just like old times.”</p>
<p>One of the blinds Luca didn’t get to in time, and though there’s no one left in the factory right now he wishes someone other than him were there to see Tommy Shelby get onto his knees in his expensive suit for the sole purpose of sucking his cock.</p>
<p>Tommy pulls down the trousers still hanging off Luca’s hips and gets to his task with the kind of professional diligence that Luca remembers. His mouth was made for this, it’s truly a tragedy that the criminal empire did so well for him, and Luca can appreciate a job well done (even more so for the extended period of celibacy caused by his incarceration) but it’s not what he wants from this. His hand finds the back of Tommy’s head, cradles the fragile point in his palm, and then with a rough twist he pulls on the short dark hair between his fingers.</p>
<p>Tommy moans, which is an interesting development as both the vibrations and the <em> knowledge </em>of this fact shoot through Luca like lightning. His eyes roll a little, but he pulls back to see Tommy staring up at him still somehow defiant with Luca’s cock sliding between his pretty pink lips. He tugs again, even harder this time, and Tommy pulls off to gasp, panting a little.</p>
<p>“Mr Changretta,” He starts, his voice as detached as if Luca were merely a difficult business partner, as if he can pretend, which would irritate Luca but there’s already a rough quality to Tommy’s voice there that Tommy can’t deny and <em> that </em> is satisfaction enough. “If you want this done fast-” He breaks off in a gasp as Luca’s hand, still threaded through his hair, tightens again.</p>
<p>“And what,” He asks, loosening his hand and dragging his palm down to stroke his thumb across the cut of Tommy’s cheekbone. “Gave you the impression that I wanted this done fast, huh?”</p>
<p>Tommy’s lips press together as he takes in Luca’s words, and Luca sees the keen understanding pass through his eyes before he nods. His mouth, when he returns it to the head of Luca’s cock, is slow and open so Luca can hold his head still in his palm as he pushes past the pillowy plushness of Tommy Shelby’s bottom lip. Luca snaps the match still in his mouth between his teeth as Tommy sinks lower onto him, slow as instructed, before beginning the slow drag back.</p>
<p>Tommy’s moan, the off-guard and honest sound of it, the catch in the noise as Tommy tried and failed to stifle it, is still ringing in his ears. This is all well and good; Tommy has a talent for cock-sucking that left unattended would pull a brilliant orgasm from Luca much as it did all those years ago (though even that was different, that was half-dark and not-quite-hidden, blood on his knuckles and fire in his heart) but Luca needs more for satisfaction. No. Luca <em> wants </em> more.</p>
<p>He’s always had a predilection for owning beautiful and expensive things. He wants to own Tommy entirely, he realises, and fortunately knows where to begin with that.</p>
<p>“Touch yourself,” He says, and it’s almost a fight for his voice to stay steady as Tommy’s tongue does something clever and uninstructed at the base of Luca’s cock. It’s not a command. None of this is <em> necessary</em>. In fact, he adds, “If you like.” to really see the cogs in Tommy’s head spin.</p>
<p>To his credit, there’s only the merest of momentary stutters in Tommy’s rhythm but in it Luca feels every thought, plan, argument and counter argument that wheels through Tommy, before he lands on something that, although not the surrender Luca is aiming for, feels like a <em> Why not? </em> as he reaches between his legs.</p>
<p>Luca isn’t too disappointed. They have time for more. Much more.</p>
<p>Tommy isn’t fully hard as he blindly undoes his trousers with one hand, the other settling at Luca’s hip to hold him in place - as if Luca is going anywhere with a show like this - but there’s definitely a tent in his underwear as he slips his hand inside with a groan muffled on Luca’s cock. “Good, sweetheart, good.” Luca purrs, and Tommy’s eyes flick up to meet his at the endearment that’s not an endearment, before flicking away again.</p>
<p>Luca likes it, the angry flush it brings to Tommy’s cheekbones, or maybe that’s brought on by the pace of his right hand.</p>
<p>“Slower,” Luca instructs, almost lazily. He can feel himself peaking, but forces his body to wait. Tommy slows the hand on himself, as if he expected the instruction anyway, and matches it to up-drag of his mouth. </p>
<p>From his vantage point, Luca doesn’t have the best view, but he makes the most of what he’s given. Here, he can only see rhythmic movements of his arm, the way his fingers disappear from sight into his underwear, and the slightest hint of the slick pink of Tommy’s cock straining against his hand. Later, Luca will see it all spread out before him, and it’s the surety of that knowledge, along with the way Tommy’s motions and breath are becoming increasingly erratic as he guides himself towards completion, that fills Luca up with something even greater than pleasure. Satisfaction. </p>
<p>His hands tighten on Tommy’s hair, both having found their way into the previously-neat, now-utterly-ruined waves, and the twist of pain coupled with the devastating pace of Tommy’s hand, drags a choking gasp from Tommy, a buck of his hips, and groan deep in his chest as he finishes. </p>
<p>The hand Tommy has on his hip slips, slams into the wooden frame of the door, and Luca closes his eyes, and lets himself follow.</p>
<p>He lets Tommy suck him down, unable to do otherwise in the white-out of his brain as he comes, but pulls out at the last so the final spurt of comes catches on Tommy’s cheek, his bottom lip, the collar of his shirt. Tommy’s eyes are closed, Luca didn’t see when they did which is an oversight he’ll have to rectify, and it’s a shame none caught on his pretty eyelashes for the perfect picture.</p>
<p>When they open, there’s still the flicker of defiance in the pale blue depths, and Luca is glad to see it. There’s no point in winning if your partner gives up. “Thank you, that was very nice. You’ve improved.”</p>
<p>Tommy ignores him. “The vendetta-”</p>
<p>“-Is still to be settled.” Luca cuts him off, because he had been very explicit about this, he feels. </p>
<p>Something sparks in Tommy’s face before . “Mr Chan-”</p>
<p>“The deal was that you come to my hotel room tonight. Was it not?” </p>
<p>Tommy’s jaw juts for a second, before setting. He doesn’t respond, which is good enough for Luca. As he tucks himself away, pulls his shirt back over his shoulders and slips the buttons closed, he adds, “I’ve booked a suite at the Midland. I assume you’ll know which.” The significance won’t be missed. Luca knows how often Tommy takes whores in that hotel. </p>
<p>Tommy nods. “I’ll find you,” He says, and Luca isn’t imagining the glint of something else crossing Tommy’s face as he buttons himself back up. Something darker, hungrier, that Luca’s sure Tommy won’t even admit to himself. Not yet, at any rate.</p>
<p>“Good,” he says again, and reaches down. Tommy doesn’t flinch from the hand that Luca places at his cheek, nor the thumb that sweeps away the come on his lip, rubs it into the slick flesh there. “What did you do?” He asks, thumb still pulled on Tommy’s bottom lip. “With that handkerchief I gave you.”</p>
<p>“Can’t remember.”</p>
<p>Luca’s grin is a sharks, sniffing blood in the water. “Liar.”</p>
<p>Tommy shrugs. The lie was just for show; they both remember what happened then. They’ll both remember what happened today. “Polly unpicked the embroidery and we sold it. It was good Italian silk. It fetched a high price.”</p>
<p>That twists something nasty inside Luca’s chest, but he ignores it. Pointless emotion. Still, he can’t help bending down until his face is level with Tommy’s, his thumb still caught on the swell of his bottom lip. “Can’t sell this one,” he says, low and pointed, before pulling Tommy’s mouth to his.</p>
<p>This is different, instantly, and Luca knows he’s made a slight miscalculation here. Whores on their knees have never mattered, they can be anyone at all, but a kiss is for wives and mistresses. Not for this. But Luca had wanted it, wanted Tommy owned in another way, and he can’t regret it. It’s as biting as it is brief, but Luca knows he could go back for more even as he pulls away.</p>
<p>Patience, he counsels himself, and straightens.</p>
<p>“Tonight,” Tommy says before he can, a little breathless, and Luca nods, collects his jacket, collects his hat.</p>
<p>“Don’t be late.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
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